Welcome to Reading Over the Weekend. We’ll start this series in postwar Britain with Alex Craigie’s wonderfully nostalgic The Rat in the Python book series.

Some books ask to be analysed. Others ask to be remembered. And then there are those that make you pause halfway through a page and say, I want to remember that.

Over the weekend, I will share some of the books that have caught my attention — what I enjoyed about them, what surprised me, and occasionally the memories or questions they stirred.

Reading Over the Weekend: The Rat in the Python by Alex Craigie

There are books that take you somewhere you have never been. And then there are books that take you somewhere you thought you had forgotten.

Alex Craigie’s The Rat in the Python series belongs firmly in the second category.

Across three books — The Home, Shopping and Food, and Fashion — Craigie takes us into postwar Britain and follows the extraordinary changes that unfolded in ordinary life. There are no grand battles here, no kings or queens, no castles or lost manuscripts. Instead, there are laundry days, electric fires, television sets, stockings, shopping stamps, food, hairstyles, school clothes and the small household rituals that tell us perhaps more about an era than any history book could.

The Rat In The Python: Book 1 The Home by Alex Craigie

The first book, The Home, looks at domestic life in postwar Britain.

If you have never heard of a liberty bodice, have no idea what a half-crown was, or cannot imagine a television picture being corrected by giving the set a good slap, Craigie’s opening warning might make you wonder whether you have accidentally wandered into another century.

In a way, you have. But that is precisely the charm of the book.

Craigie writes about the everyday objects and routines that shaped people’s lives: lighting the morning fire, washing clothes, keeping warm, making do, repairing rather than replacing, and finding another use for something that had apparently reached the end of its useful life.

That last part resonated particularly strongly with me.

Reading about the frugality of postwar Britain brought back memories of my own childhood in communist Romania. We washed clothes by hand, sometimes in the bathtub, and we learned very quickly that electricity was something to be used carefully. Household objects were not disposable. They were mended, adapted, treasured and used for as long as human ingenuity could keep them going.

Different countries. Different circumstances. Yet the same instinct: waste nothing if you can help it. Craigie captures that world with warmth rather than sentimentality, and the photographs and illustrations add another delightful layer to the experience.

And then there is the humour.

I laughed my way through much of this book.

The Rat In The Python: Book 2 Shopping and Food by Alex Craigie

The Rat in the Python: Book 2 — Shopping and Food moves from the home to the shops and the dinner table.

Here we encounter farthings, Green Shield stamps, beef dripping sandwiches, Babycham and all those little details that turn a historical period into something tangible.

Craigie has a wonderful ability to make an apparently insignificant object tell a larger story: a stamp is not merely a stamp; a particular food is not merely something people ate; a coin is not merely currency.

Each one carries an entire social world behind it.

The title of the series itself refers to the postwar Baby Boom — the sudden increase in births that created a statistical bulge in the population, rather like a rat moving through a python. It is an amusing image, but behind it lies a fascinating story of demographic and social change.

What I particularly enjoyed was the combination of personal recollection, research, statistics, anecdotes and period advertising. The result feels both informative and intimate. It made me think about how quickly ordinary life disappears.

We remember the important historical events. We remember wars, elections, technological breakthroughs and famous people.

But who remembers what a loaf of bread cost? Who remembers how shopping was done? Who remembers what children ate after school? Who remembers the little rituals of an ordinary Tuesday?

Those details are history too. Sometimes they are the history I most want to read.

The Rat In The Python: Book 3 Fashion by Alex Craigie

Then came Book 3 — Fashion, which may have been my favourite of the three, perhaps because clothing is so closely connected to memory.

A dress can take us back to a particular age. A hairstyle can summon an entire decade. A pair of shoes can remind us of a person we have not thought about for years.

Craigie follows fashion from the austerity of the postwar years through Dior, twinsets, Beatniks, Mary Quant, the miniskirt, psychedelia, James Dean’s jeans, the exuberance of the 1970s and beyond. There are fox tippets and liberty bodices, cone bras and platform boots. There are long, long hairstyles and short, short skirts.

Delightfully, there are the little tricks women used when fashion demanded something that reality did not quite provide — including the unforgettable practice of drawing a stocking seam on one’s leg with a brow pencil.

That detail alone tells us something about wartime shortages, ingenuity and the importance of appearance: fashion, after all, is never simply about clothes. It tells us what society values. It tells us what women are expected to look like, and what happens when women begin refusing those expectations. It tells us about money, class, technology, youth culture, music and rebellion.

A change in hemline can sometimes reveal a change in the world beneath it – Craigie understands that.

And once again, the photographs and illustrations make the journey particularly enjoyable. There are also quizzes at the end, which add another layer of fun. I found myself slipping down a kind of memory slide, discovering memories I did not realise I still carried.

The Rat in the Python by Alex Craigie: a journey that crossed borders

The greatest pleasure of these books, for me, was recognising that memory does not always respect national borders. Craigie writes about Britain, I grew up in communist Romania. Our experiences were certainly not identical. The political, economic and social realities were very different.

Yet, while reading, I repeatedly found little points of recognition: the careful use of electricity. The habit of repairing things rather than throwing them away. The ingenuity of making do. The importance of household objects. The food, clothes, rituals.

The understanding that what you had today might need to last much longer than you expected. That is one of the pleasures of reading about another person’s past. We begin by looking at their memories and discover some of our own hiding among them.

Why I enjoyed The Rat in the Python

What makes this series so enjoyable is Craigie’s combination of nostalgia, humour and historical curiosity.

These books do not lecture about the past, they invite us into it.

They remind us that history did not happen only in palaces, parliament buildings and battlefields. It happened in kitchens, shops, bedrooms, schoolyards and sitting rooms. It happened while somebody struggled to get the television picture working. It happened while a mother washed clothes. It happened while somebody collected Green Shield stamps. It happened when a young woman put on a new dress and stepped outside.

And it happened in millions of other ordinary moments that nobody thought worth recording at the time.

Until someone came along years later and remembered.

The Rat in the Python trilogy so much. It is funny, affectionate and wonderfully evocative, but it is also a reminder of how quickly the familiar becomes strange.

For readers who lived through these decades, Craigie’s books may bring back memories they thought were long gone.

For younger readers, they offer a glimpse into a world that can seem almost as distant as the Jurassic Era.

And for readers like me, who grew up somewhere else entirely, they reveal something rather wonderful: our memories may speak different languages, but sometimes they tell remarkably similar stories.

Highly recommended.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to find a cup of tea and remember what else I’ve forgotten.

Discover The Rat in the Python and more boos by Alex Craigie on Goodreads.

Have you read Alex Craigie’s The Rat in the Python series? What ordinary object, food, item of clothing or household ritual instantly takes you back to your childhood?

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Reading Over the Weekend is a blog series celebrating the joy of reading. Not every book I read will be new. Not every book will belong to the same genre. Some may be historical fiction, others memoir, family history, mystery, biography, or something completely unexpected. What they will have in common is that they have stayed with me after I closed the book. Perhaps they taught me something. Perhaps they made me laugh. Perhaps they opened a door into a world I had never known. Or perhaps, like a forgotten scent or an old photograph, they brought back something I thought I had lost.

I have always believed that reading is a form of travelling. We can cross centuries without leaving our chair, visit countries we have never seen, inhabit lives entirely different from our own, and sometimes return to our own childhood through somebody else’s memories.